Wisconsin produces productivity shortfall

9:14 PM,
Jun. 23, 2013

Written by

Mike Nichols

As far back as the Civil War, Wisconsin soldiers fighting in the south derided the lazy southern land owners and observed that the abhorrent use of slave labor had, as it was said, "perverted their energies."

"How shiftless," remarked one soldier in an essay I found through the Wisconsin Historical Society. "An air of decay pervades everything. The very soil seems to pray for an infusion of northern blood and Yankee ingenuity." ...